When I moved in with my fiancé a while back, we struck a deal: I agreed to allow a TV in my home IF he agreed to no meat in our home.  I’m passionate about veganism.  The fiancé is passionate about television.  I don’t like having a TV because I experience it as a poison box, yelling at me from my own apartment, brainwashing me to be dull, greedy, and compliant.  Much like carcass, I don’t want the media in my sacred space.  I never turn the TV on, in stark contrast to Mike, my fianc- last night at dinner I discovered fianc- while annoying in its overused abbrev-ed state, it’s a wonderful way to say the word “fiancé” without the discomfort of using the word “fiancé”.

Though I admit, of late, I have been so much more impressed with TV than films: Game of Thrones, Dexter, Louie, Veep, Breaking Bad… However, of all these amazing shows, the only one I get a real rock hard steady boner for is Teen Mom, followed closely by 16 & Pregnant.

Teen Mom, from what I understand, isn’t “quality television,” but that doesn’t bother me at all.  I watch it firstly for the babies, I love babies like a crazy lady that steals babies from hospitals, but doesn’t… yet.

I like the babies in 16 & Pregnant, when they’re so wrinkled, crusty, and useless that my ovaries ache. I like them the first season when they do nothing but cry and drink and sigh so much, they remind me of when I was single.  And in season two I love them so much I cant stand it because now they talk.  And guess what they say ALL THE TIME?  ”I love you so much.”  “SO MUCH” — ANYONE CAN SAY I LOVE YOU, BUT THEY ALL ADD THE ‘SO MUCH’ AND IT’S TOO MUCH!!!!! Next, I watch it for the grandma’s — the grandmothers on the show are a colorful assortment of toothless 30-something’s in desperate relationships with meth dealers or coal miners.  Each with a more surprising facial piercing than the next.  Where will they think of next?  Last, I watch for the teen moms.  Some I like, some I love to hate, and all I totally resent for having a baby.  No fair.

I watch that fucking show, and I can hardly bear how legitimately jealous of the teen moms I feel.  They choose some of the sickest humans for that show, and still all I think is how truly unjust that they get to have a baby and I don’t.  Where’s my fucking baby?

Hey! I graduated from high school: where’s my baby prize?  I didn’t have unprotected sex with a puberty monster!  May I have my baby prize now?  Never once have I spent a paycheck on Ed Hardy car seat covers:  and THE UNIVERSE FORGOT TO BRING ME MY BABY PRIZE!!!!!!

IIIIIII wanna have a baby.  I’ve wanted to have a baby since I was one of those adorable toddlers pretending to mother a doll.  Turns out, all you have to do is have sex with an idiot — any idiot with at least 82 acne pustules and a DUI — and you win a baby prize.  If I had known, in high school, that I could have a baby and be on a reality show that paid the bills for my baby, my goals would have been precisely to have a baby and be on a reality show that paid the bills for my baby.  And I would be more successful than I am now: which is to say, baby-less, baby-void, and utterly lacking in baby.

I watch Teen Mom and tell my fiancé very sincerely that if I had known this was an option available to me, I would have done this.  (And he still wants to marry me.)  Um, you can just get pregnant and drop out of high school?  Where do I sign up?  Unfortunately for me and my sad life, I was born to overprotective parents, sent to prep school, and given a sailboat. I never even had a chance.

Very sadly, as a result of being baby starved for so long, I developed a pretty serious coping mechanism, called a baby stash.   A baby stash, for those of you with balanced hormones, is what I call the closet in which I keep one hundred items: organic, green, recycled baby shit I’ve bought on sale from various health food marts.  Lots of cloth diapers, lots of onesies, blankets, BPA free bottles, organic cotton stuffed animals… but they’re all discounted!  Most of them were on sale!  Some of them somewhat significantly! That’s my justification.  Normal, right?  Mike, my fianc- (has it caught on yet?  I thought I smelled a wild fire!) found my baby stash several months into dating.  We’d already moved in together, so I stuffed the stash in a bag and hid it in the back seat of my car, so he wouldn’t know for sure I had problems.  But he found it searching for a sweatshirt for me.  (Bet I wouldn’t be so fucking cold all the time if I had a baby in my tummy.  UUGGGHHH.)

I have a pinterest board pissility titled ‘NO FAIR’ and it’s all pictures of babies. I don’t want to make you look at pictures of my dog either, but I don’t have a baby so… Not all dog people are baby people without a baby, but I sure am.  I’ve got three dogs.  I got the first two when I was living alone at 19, and the third about two years later. So, I did manage to find SOME way to be a mother of 3 by age 21. I guess this is just how its gonna be until I have a tiny human baby of my very own. Mike already can’t share anybody’s baby news with me without my going “uuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhh, are you seeeeriiiiooooouuuuus…”, I sometimes buy dollar store pregnancy tests to prep for the day I miss my period like a happy earthquake kit, and I’ve strongly considered buying my own ultrasound machine just to take a look-see at what’s happening, but you know what they say, ‘a watched pot never boils.’ So I guess I have to be surprised like everyone else. What a crock of flaming bullshit. Luckily for me, Mike’s favorite movie is Raising Arizona, so I won’t have to do too much mental ninjitsu to convince him to steal some overworked mother’s septuplet.  Maybe I’ll get my wish after all…